Why then is playing movies at 1280x720 not a no-brainer?
Because, unlike computer monitors and video cards, most televisions aren't capable of that resolution, and the difference in price between ones that do and ones that don't doesn't make the choice obvious. If the quality was really 10x better like you were implying, perhaps the choice would be obvious, but for only a 2x improvement you're going to find that many people opt for a cheap SD set over an expensive HD set.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sold on HD, and my next set will be HD (though I may not buy a new set for another 3 years since my current 35" Trinitron works just fine). I, like most geeks however, am generally well overpaid and can afford to spend 5 times as much on a TV set for a 2x quality improvement. If I made half my current salary though, there wouldn't be a chance in hell that there would be an HD set in my future until the prices came *way* down.
The hardware for BluRay is all worked out already. I would expect the units to ship without a BluRay player and then a firmware release in the future to enable playing BluRay movies before Sony lets the launch be pushed back... Like they did with the browser and the PSP... If it gets pushed back it'll likely be for other reasons. Not that it will matter much. It would be a stretch to call the 360 "launched" at this point (It's almost as if they're using the Nvidia definition of the word), and there isn't any signifigant amount of HD content out there at the moment. As long as it comes out in time for the content it won't matter which unit launched first, all that will matter is, as usual, the games.
Right, but when you're comparing pixel counts, you have to remember your eye notes increases in the square of the pixel count. That makes the quality increase between DVD and 720p (using your pixel counts, which I haven't checked for accuracy) only about 2x. Use that square root button on your calculator and see for yourself.
Well, I'm not sure about DVD quality, but on television (especially football games)
Yeah, but have you noticed lately that Non-HD Football coverage (the american kind) looks especially crappy? It didn't look that bad a few years ago, but now there's blurring of detail, digital artifacts around the edges of movement, etc... I don't know if they do it on purpose to encourage football fans to upgrade, or they just have crappy equipment doing the downscaling from their HD signal, or what, but it didn't look that bad in the recent past and now it looks like shit; especially on ABC. Is it that you're seeing such a huge difference because it's HD, or is it because the SD version is degraded to the point where it's blindingly obvious?
That deadline is irrelevant or several reasons, but those reasons include that people with cable or sattelite are unaffected, that new SD sets will support digital boradcasts, and old SD sets will work just fine receiving digital broadcasts through a converter box.
Digital broadcasts will not force people to go HD.
I agree that Hollywood is losing money because what they create is junk
Excuse me? Just because they call making less money than they though they would, and making less money than some other year "losing" money doesn't mean you have to help spread the lie.
HD is coming, and once your TV size goes to 42", you are going to want to have it.
My TV is going to grow? Amazing. Especially considering that it's just the right size for the spot it's in. I wonder how it will fit... Seriously though, we're a minimum of 5 years away from widespread HD adoption. It will probably be longer, since most people replace their TV after 10 years on average, but not everybody buying new TVs today are buying HD sets. Actually not even a majority are buying HD sets. 32" SD is the norm. The only reason the masses will buy HD media in that time frame is if it's the only media available. It won't be though, because all the HD players will be DVD compatable, and all the non-cartel members will keep publishing on DVD to maximize the potential market. The early push to HD media with extra DRM is going to open the door for "independant" creators and publishers, and the *IAA member companies are going to see their market share decrease more and more.
Of course, when you get down to the level of intent, you get to his contention that "Help me crash my school's server" was a joke, and that he wasn't actually trying to get people to follow through. And things get murky.
No matter what his intent, given the severity of the possible outcome the appropriate punishment was likely detention, not felony prosecution.
Though I would have thought that a similar thickness block of solid PMMA or PC would deliver comparable stiffness
Polymers that have a comperable stiffness to steel or even aluminum have a nasty habit of either not being transparent, not maintaining their stiffness under increased temperature, or not maintaining their transparency under increased temperature. Plus, they're not cheap. This wasn't a problem back when drives were lower capacity and slower. Manufacturers made drives with polycarbonate tops all the time for marketing. Somewhere around 80GB at 7200 RPM it didn't work anymore. The drives would eat themselves after a few hours.
Even steel has it's problems. I've seen arrays of 2.5" SAS drives where, unlike current 3.5" arrays, the drives were racked in multiple rows instead of one row across the front of the chassis (picture a grid of discs on their side from the top down*). When aligned this way in a perfect grid, the vibrational resonance of striped access caused signifigantly decreased drive life, and the manufacturer had to rotate each row of disks slightly to solve the problem**.
Again, using solid diamond would sold the stiffness problem;)
And the thermal problems... And it would be shiny... What's taking those nanotech engineers so long? I'd rather they used it as the substrate for semi-conductors first though...
* |||| ||||
** //// \\\\
And now some extra text to get my diagrams past the lameness filter... hopefully... There should have been 4 rows of 8 in each of those, but it made me delete some.
That doesn't mean that CS grads shouldn't be employed in industry at all, just that the assumption that they are generally prepared for product development work isn't a good one.
I don't want to say that you can't be a Computer Scientist without being a good Software Engineer, but I will say that you can't be a Good Computer Scientist without being a good Software Engineer. Every one of the skills a good software engineer needs together forms a subset of the skills required by a good computer scientist. Though perhaps you're confusing Software Engineers with Computer Programmers?
all of the examples you've given are embedded software [...] It's also the software most likely to be written by people trained as engineers (electrical or computer), rather than CS grads
How do you figure? As a developer of commercial embedded software, that hasn't been my experience. Teams usually consist of both, but code written by Electrical Engineers, well, let's just say it's notorious.
Let's cut the bull though. My problem here, and why I engaged in this discussion is your implication that computer scientists make poor software engineers ("Sadly, many developers are graduates from CS programmes instead of engineering programmes"). Above all else, please save your judgement for the quality of particular education programs instead of blanketing an entire field with your views. Many of us went to engineering schools, and got formal engineering training along with our computer science degrees. The real problem is that it's too easy to get a degree and not actually take any benefit from the experience, not that computer scientists create crappy software. That's as silly as saying "Sadly most modern drugs are developed by molecular biologists instead of genetic engineers".
...while the rest of us prefer to skip the stereotypes and judge a game on whether it employs plot, strategy, reflex testing, good graphics, or a combination thereof.
Most games don't fall cleanly into one of your two snottily worded flamebait categories.
Incidentally, I thought both Final Fantasy VII, and Morrowind were two of the best games ever made, while I thought that Knights of the Old Republic was shit. Sure, many japanese style RPGs have a crappy plot, but many "western style" RPGs have shitty gameplay. It works both ways. Sorry to shatter the clean black and white reality of your little world.
I think that's a bit naive. Clearly what's going on here is that Microsoft wanted to play like this wasn't any more serious than usual and could wait until their pre-planned update day. This is clear from their insistance that we all wait, and then their sudden change of heart that followed the media uproar. So, what we have here is probably 1 day to produce a patch, and nine days to bicker with the marketing department over whether to release it. If you're lucky, they tested it too. Just because other companies are neglegant and wait 200+ days to patch their software doesn't give Microsoft a good excuse to do the same, especially considering that none of those other companies (I don't care who they are) have a problem that is as signifigant as this.
What did Microsoft do to win your unwavering sympathy?
As much as I bitched and moaned at my Dad, he absolutely did not want to correct the cashier a second time.
Wow.
If you're too lazy to bitch to the manager, the least you could have done is walked out. Bitching to the manager would probably have yielded a free lunch though.
Obviously, you're not a McDonald's shareholder who would be familiar with these problems.
No, but I have been a McDonald's assistant manager signifigantly longer than a few years ago. What every your friend's managers were doing wasn't something McDonald's was doing, or needed to "figure out". For decades, the policy was after 20 minutes it gets marked on the 'waste' form and thrown out. Recently even 20 minutes was too long.
As sombody who ate plane McDonald's cheeseburgers as a small child, and catered to customers who ordered "Cheese Delights" (a "secret" McDonalds menu item which is a bun with cheese only stuck in the BigMac bun toaster for 30 seconds) even when they technically weren't on the menu, I'm seriously surprised at your pickle problem. Forgetful line cooks, I can see, but cashiers that refuse to do it is at best uncommon, and something they should and could easily be fired for. There's even a button on the cash register for it... Even the old school registers with the printed on buttons.
CS programmes should be teaching Computer Science - you know, the stuff that prepares you for a career in research.
Apparently you think that no research is done in industry. Do you think all new products are just put together out of off the shelf, or obvious techniques? Perhaps you think all new software products have their roots in academia?
Sorry, thanks for playing. You've got the difference between scientists and engineers down pretty well, but plenty of research is done in the private sector. Also, there is no reason why a scientist can't also be a good engineer.
One last thing...
one of the reasons the world of industrial software development is so screwed up.
It's not screwed up. You only hear about or notice the bad software. Most industrial software is very high quality. Think of all that software in your car, your home appliances, your electric tooth brush, your television... Even in computing devices. Think about your ethernet switch, your office telephone, your storage array, you name it... You don't realize there is software there because it doesn't get in your way. It just works. The devices that don't end up driven out of the marketplace very quickly. Bad software being considered ubiquitous is a recent phenomenon that arrived with desktop computing.
Ironically, it took McDonald's years to allow U.S. customers to order "whatever they want however they want" instead of pulling an already made item that's been sitting under the heat lamp for hours.
Having just read your resume, I can tell you that you haven't been alive long enough to have seen a time when McDonalds let anything sit around for more than 15 minutes (I'm assuming you're approximately 30 judging from the dates on there), and they have always been willing to make you a fresh one with any customizations you asked for... Turns out the only thing ironic here is your post.
It's actualy a matter of vibration. The top of the case has to be rigid enough to prevent micro-vibrations and resonance from causing the head to hit the platter. If you look at the pictures of this drive you'll notice that the top is still metal with a few plastic areas to keep the stiffness high.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd be spinning off profitable divisions to focus on their core business and new development. For the next 20 years they should be creating entities that feed investment cash back to the core instead of creating more and more divisions (yes, double meaning) that keep distracting them from what they used to be good at while they all battle for influence.
It would benefit them, and it would benefit the market. Everybody would be happy, except for all the execs that have gotten comfortable with winning by throwing money and unrelated market share at a problem instead of by creating the best solution to a given problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Why then is playing movies at 1280x720 not a no-brainer?
Because, unlike computer monitors and video cards, most televisions aren't capable of that resolution, and the difference in price between ones that do and ones that don't doesn't make the choice obvious. If the quality was really 10x better like you were implying, perhaps the choice would be obvious, but for only a 2x improvement you're going to find that many people opt for a cheap SD set over an expensive HD set.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sold on HD, and my next set will be HD (though I may not buy a new set for another 3 years since my current 35" Trinitron works just fine). I, like most geeks however, am generally well overpaid and can afford to spend 5 times as much on a TV set for a 2x quality improvement. If I made half my current salary though, there wouldn't be a chance in hell that there would be an HD set in my future until the prices came *way* down.
The hardware for BluRay is all worked out already. I would expect the units to ship without a BluRay player and then a firmware release in the future to enable playing BluRay movies before Sony lets the launch be pushed back... Like they did with the browser and the PSP... If it gets pushed back it'll likely be for other reasons. Not that it will matter much. It would be a stretch to call the 360 "launched" at this point (It's almost as if they're using the Nvidia definition of the word), and there isn't any signifigant amount of HD content out there at the moment. As long as it comes out in time for the content it won't matter which unit launched first, all that will matter is, as usual, the games.
Right, but when you're comparing pixel counts, you have to remember your eye notes increases in the square of the pixel count. That makes the quality increase between DVD and 720p (using your pixel counts, which I haven't checked for accuracy) only about 2x. Use that square root button on your calculator and see for yourself.
Well, I'm not sure about DVD quality, but on television (especially football games)
Yeah, but have you noticed lately that Non-HD Football coverage (the american kind) looks especially crappy? It didn't look that bad a few years ago, but now there's blurring of detail, digital artifacts around the edges of movement, etc... I don't know if they do it on purpose to encourage football fans to upgrade, or they just have crappy equipment doing the downscaling from their HD signal, or what, but it didn't look that bad in the recent past and now it looks like shit; especially on ABC. Is it that you're seeing such a huge difference because it's HD, or is it because the SD version is degraded to the point where it's blindingly obvious?
You're confusing digital broadcasting with HDTV.
That deadline is irrelevant or several reasons, but those reasons include that people with cable or sattelite are unaffected, that new SD sets will support digital boradcasts, and old SD sets will work just fine receiving digital broadcasts through a converter box.
Digital broadcasts will not force people to go HD.
I agree that Hollywood is losing money because what they create is junk
Excuse me? Just because they call making less money than they though they would, and making less money than some other year "losing" money doesn't mean you have to help spread the lie.
HD is coming, and once your TV size goes to 42", you are going to want to have it.
My TV is going to grow? Amazing. Especially considering that it's just the right size for the spot it's in. I wonder how it will fit... Seriously though, we're a minimum of 5 years away from widespread HD adoption. It will probably be longer, since most people replace their TV after 10 years on average, but not everybody buying new TVs today are buying HD sets. Actually not even a majority are buying HD sets. 32" SD is the norm. The only reason the masses will buy HD media in that time frame is if it's the only media available. It won't be though, because all the HD players will be DVD compatable, and all the non-cartel members will keep publishing on DVD to maximize the potential market. The early push to HD media with extra DRM is going to open the door for "independant" creators and publishers, and the *IAA member companies are going to see their market share decrease more and more.
Not the solution you're looking for, but there are a variety of USB audio devices available from soundcards to speakers...
Does printing to PDF with this software maintain the text-editable form fields and embedded scripts?
Violation of your ISP's TOS?
Of course, when you get down to the level of intent, you get to his contention that "Help me crash my school's server" was a joke, and that he wasn't actually trying to get people to follow through. And things get murky.
No matter what his intent, given the severity of the possible outcome the appropriate punishment was likely detention, not felony prosecution.
Though I would have thought that a similar thickness block of solid PMMA or PC would deliver comparable stiffness
;)
////
Polymers that have a comperable stiffness to steel or even aluminum have a nasty habit of either not being transparent, not maintaining their stiffness under increased temperature, or not maintaining their transparency under increased temperature. Plus, they're not cheap. This wasn't a problem back when drives were lower capacity and slower. Manufacturers made drives with polycarbonate tops all the time for marketing. Somewhere around 80GB at 7200 RPM it didn't work anymore. The drives would eat themselves after a few hours.
Even steel has it's problems. I've seen arrays of 2.5" SAS drives where, unlike current 3.5" arrays, the drives were racked in multiple rows instead of one row across the front of the chassis (picture a grid of discs on their side from the top down*). When aligned this way in a perfect grid, the vibrational resonance of striped access caused signifigantly decreased drive life, and the manufacturer had to rotate each row of disks slightly to solve the problem**.
Again, using solid diamond would sold the stiffness problem
And the thermal problems... And it would be shiny... What's taking those nanotech engineers so long? I'd rather they used it as the substrate for semi-conductors first though...
*
||||
||||
**
\\\\
And now some extra text to get my diagrams past the lameness filter... hopefully... There should have been 4 rows of 8 in each of those, but it made me delete some.
That doesn't mean that CS grads shouldn't be employed in industry at all, just that the assumption that they are generally prepared for product development work isn't a good one.
I don't want to say that you can't be a Computer Scientist without being a good Software Engineer, but I will say that you can't be a Good Computer Scientist without being a good Software Engineer. Every one of the skills a good software engineer needs together forms a subset of the skills required by a good computer scientist. Though perhaps you're confusing Software Engineers with Computer Programmers?
all of the examples you've given are embedded software [...] It's also the software most likely to be written by people trained as engineers (electrical or computer), rather than CS grads
How do you figure? As a developer of commercial embedded software, that hasn't been my experience. Teams usually consist of both, but code written by Electrical Engineers, well, let's just say it's notorious.
Let's cut the bull though. My problem here, and why I engaged in this discussion is your implication that computer scientists make poor software engineers ("Sadly, many developers are graduates from CS programmes instead of engineering programmes"). Above all else, please save your judgement for the quality of particular education programs instead of blanketing an entire field with your views. Many of us went to engineering schools, and got formal engineering training along with our computer science degrees. The real problem is that it's too easy to get a degree and not actually take any benefit from the experience, not that computer scientists create crappy software. That's as silly as saying "Sadly most modern drugs are developed by molecular biologists instead of genetic engineers".
...while the rest of us prefer to skip the stereotypes and judge a game on whether it employs plot, strategy, reflex testing, good graphics, or a combination thereof.
Most games don't fall cleanly into one of your two snottily worded flamebait categories.
Incidentally, I thought both Final Fantasy VII, and Morrowind were two of the best games ever made, while I thought that Knights of the Old Republic was shit. Sure, many japanese style RPGs have a crappy plot, but many "western style" RPGs have shitty gameplay. It works both ways. Sorry to shatter the clean black and white reality of your little world.
I think that's a bit naive. Clearly what's going on here is that Microsoft wanted to play like this wasn't any more serious than usual and could wait until their pre-planned update day. This is clear from their insistance that we all wait, and then their sudden change of heart that followed the media uproar. So, what we have here is probably 1 day to produce a patch, and nine days to bicker with the marketing department over whether to release it. If you're lucky, they tested it too. Just because other companies are neglegant and wait 200+ days to patch their software doesn't give Microsoft a good excuse to do the same, especially considering that none of those other companies (I don't care who they are) have a problem that is as signifigant as this.
What did Microsoft do to win your unwavering sympathy?
As much as I bitched and moaned at my Dad, he absolutely did not want to correct the cashier a second time.
Wow.
If you're too lazy to bitch to the manager, the least you could have done is walked out. Bitching to the manager would probably have yielded a free lunch though.
Yes, yes... Those are the ones I meant. Even if you count those, there were way less RPGs for Xbox than the PS2 or the PC.
Obviously, you're not a McDonald's shareholder who would be familiar with these problems.
No, but I have been a McDonald's assistant manager signifigantly longer than a few years ago. What every your friend's managers were doing wasn't something McDonald's was doing, or needed to "figure out". For decades, the policy was after 20 minutes it gets marked on the 'waste' form and thrown out. Recently even 20 minutes was too long.
As sombody who ate plane McDonald's cheeseburgers as a small child, and catered to customers who ordered "Cheese Delights" (a "secret" McDonalds menu item which is a bun with cheese only stuck in the BigMac bun toaster for 30 seconds) even when they technically weren't on the menu, I'm seriously surprised at your pickle problem. Forgetful line cooks, I can see, but cashiers that refuse to do it is at best uncommon, and something they should and could easily be fired for. There's even a button on the cash register for it... Even the old school registers with the printed on buttons.
CS programmes should be teaching Computer Science - you know, the stuff that prepares you for a career in research.
Apparently you think that no research is done in industry. Do you think all new products are just put together out of off the shelf, or obvious techniques? Perhaps you think all new software products have their roots in academia?
Sorry, thanks for playing. You've got the difference between scientists and engineers down pretty well, but plenty of research is done in the private sector. Also, there is no reason why a scientist can't also be a good engineer.
One last thing...
one of the reasons the world of industrial software development is so screwed up.
It's not screwed up. You only hear about or notice the bad software. Most industrial software is very high quality. Think of all that software in your car, your home appliances, your electric tooth brush, your television... Even in computing devices. Think about your ethernet switch, your office telephone, your storage array, you name it... You don't realize there is software there because it doesn't get in your way. It just works. The devices that don't end up driven out of the marketplace very quickly. Bad software being considered ubiquitous is a recent phenomenon that arrived with desktop computing.
Ironically, it took McDonald's years to allow U.S. customers to order "whatever they want however they want" instead of pulling an already made item that's been sitting under the heat lamp for hours.
Having just read your resume, I can tell you that you haven't been alive long enough to have seen a time when McDonalds let anything sit around for more than 15 minutes (I'm assuming you're approximately 30 judging from the dates on there), and they have always been willing to make you a fresh one with any customizations you asked for... Turns out the only thing ironic here is your post.
the XBox was considered superior for RPG type games by a lot of folks I talked to. More titles were offered there than PS/PS2.
Are you smoking crack? That's not even true if you count all the FPS/action titles that they tried to pass as RPGs.
It's actualy a matter of vibration. The top of the case has to be rigid enough to prevent micro-vibrations and resonance from causing the head to hit the platter. If you look at the pictures of this drive you'll notice that the top is still metal with a few plastic areas to keep the stiffness high.
Actually, I prefer neither.
I have yet to find a site that I care about that isn't useable with Gecko.
ActiveX [...] requires Internet Explorer
Says who?
Please point out to me where in my comment I said they could be replaced by shitty voice actors.
It matters that they're good, not that they're the same.
If Microsoft were smart, they'd be spinning off profitable divisions to focus on their core business and new development. For the next 20 years they should be creating entities that feed investment cash back to the core instead of creating more and more divisions (yes, double meaning) that keep distracting them from what they used to be good at while they all battle for influence.
It would benefit them, and it would benefit the market. Everybody would be happy, except for all the execs that have gotten comfortable with winning by throwing money and unrelated market share at a problem instead of by creating the best solution to a given problem.